The KGB ﻿

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﻿The KGB is a common abbreviation for the Russian words komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopanosti meaning in English Committee for State Security. It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954-1991 also including internal security, intelligence, and the secret police. The KGB was said to be the most effective organization when it came to gathering information. They used legal spies and illegal spies. Legal spies have diplomatic immunity from prosecution if caught by their target country illegal spies are not protected with diplomatic immunity from prosecution.

The Soviet Union recruited many idealistic, high level westerners as ideological agents but after numerous events including the Hungarian Uprising ended ideological recruitment. Poor leadership also repelled young, left wing radicals from the Soviet Socialist cause so the KGB had to bribe or blackmail westerners into spying for the Soviet Union. The agents or better known as the spies would first emigrate to a neighboring country then emigrate to the target country or the country the agent would be spying on. While in the country the agents would steal and photograph documents, send dead letter boxes, arrange kidnappings and assassinations.

The KGB was established to defend the October Revolution and the Bolshevik state from its enemies principally the monarchist White Army. To ensure the Bolshevik regime's survival, it suppressed counter-revolution with domestic terror and international deception. The scope of foreign intelligence operations prompted Lenin to authorize the KGB's creation of the Foreign-intelligence Department—the precursor to the First Chief Directorate of the KGB. In 1922, Lenin's regime re-named the KGB as the State Political Directorate (OGPU).

﻿The OGPU expanded Soviet espionage nationally and internationally, and provided to Stalin the head personal bodyguard Nikolai Vlasik. The vagaries of Stalin's paranoia influenced the OGPU's performance and direction in the 1930s, conspiracies, etc. Acting as his own analyst, Stalin unwisely subordinated intelligence analysis to collecting it; eventually, reports pandered to his conspiracy fantasies. The middle history of the KGB culminates in the Great Purge (1936–38) killings of civil, military, and government people deemed politically unreliable—among them, chairmen Genrikh Yagoda (1938) and Nikolai Yezhov (1940); later, Lavrentiy Beria (1953) followed suit. Ironically, Yezhov denounced Yagoda for executing the Great Terror, which from 1937 to 1938 is called Yezhovshchina, the especially cruel "Yezhov era".In 1941, under Chairman Lavrentiy Beria, the OGPU became the NKGB and recovered from the Great Purge of the thirties. Yet, the NKGB unwisely continued pandering to Stalin's conspiracy fantasies whilst simultaneously achieving its deepest penetrations of the West. Next, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov centralised the intelligence agencies, re-organizing the NKGB as the KI (Committee of Information), of the MGB (Ministry for State Security) and the GRU (Foreign military Intelligence Directorate). In practice making an ambassador head of the MGB and GRU legal residencies in his embassy, intelligence operations are under political control, the KI ended when Molotov incurred Stalin's disfavor. Despite its political end, the KI's contribution to Soviet Intelligence was reliant upon illegal residents spies able to establish a more secure base of operations in the target country.Moreover, expecting to succeed Joseph Stalin as leader of the USSR, the ambitious head of the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs), Lavrentiy Beria merged the MGB and the MVD on Stalin's death in 1953. Anticipating a coup d'etat, the Presidium swiftly eliminated Beria with treasonous charges of "criminal anti-party and anti-state activities" and executed him. In the event, the MGB was renamed KGB and detached from the MVD.

The GRU (military intelligence) recruited the ideological agents Julian Wadleigh and Alger Hiss, who became State Department diplomats in 1936. The NKVD's first US operation was establishing the legal residency of Boris Bazarov and the illegal residency of Iskhak Akhmerov in 1934. Throughout, the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) and its General Sec'y Earl Browder, helped NKVD recruit Americans, working in government, business, and industry.

Other important, high-level ideological agents were the diplomats Laurence Duggan and Michael Whitney Straight in the State Department, the statistician Harry Dexter White in the Treasury Department, the economist Lauchlin Currie (an FDR advisor), and the "Silvermaster Group", headed by statistician Greg Silvermaster, in the Farm Security Administration and the Board of Economic Warfare. Moreover, when Whittaker Chambers, formerly Alger Hiss's courier, approached the Roosevelt Government—to identify the Soviet spies Duggan, White, and others—he was ignored. Hence, during the Second World War—at the Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam conferences Ally Joseph Stalin of the USSR, was better-informed about the war affairs of his US and UK allies, than they about his.Soviet espionage succeeded most in collecting scientific and technologic intelligence about advances in jet propulsion, radar, and encryption, which impressed Moscow, but stealing atomic secrets was the capstone of NKVD espionage against American science and technology. British Manhattan Project team physicist Klaus Fuchs (GRU) was the main agent of the Rosenberg spy ring. In 1944, the New York City residency infiltrated the top secret Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, by recruiting Theodore Hall, a nineteen-year-old Harvard physicist.